Being a completely self taught programmer, I would like it if I could better myself by self-learning the computer science course taught to a typical CS grad.

Finding different resources on internet has been easy, there is of course MIT open course ware, and there are Coursera courses from Stanford and other universities. There are numerous other open resources scattered around the Internet and some good books that are repeatedly recommended.

I have been learning a lot, but my study is heavily fragmented, which really bugs me. I would love If somewhere, I could find a path I should follow and a stack I should limit myself to, so that I can be sure about what essential parts of computer science I have studied, and then systematically approach those I haven't.

The problem with Wikipedia is it doesn't tell you what's essential but insists on being a complete reference.

MIT open course ware for Computer science and Electrical Engg. has a huge list of courses also not telling you what courses are essential and what optional as per person's interest/requirement. I found no mention of an order in which one should study different subjects.

What I would love is to create a list that I can follow, like this dummy one

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Yes, I actually like the fun theoretical stuff, I think it will increase my understanding of the subject (though that's a matter of debate in my circle). Also, I feel left alone when my CS friends have discussions about CS stuff or I irritate them by asking too many questions.
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OptimusJun 10 '12 at 12:11

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Note that there are some kinds of "islands" in the curriculum where things hang together. You e.g. do rarely need lambda calculus in graph theory. Also consider that it might be nice to have mentors around - do you live close to a suitable educational institution?
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user1249Jun 10 '12 at 12:19

As a matter of fact I do, and am friendly with the profs but I cannot bug them all the time. They have contributed to a lot of fragmented knowledge I have in the first place.
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OptimusJun 10 '12 at 12:44

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In that case you might be able to take a selected course or two - that allows you to bug the profs all the time.
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user1249Jun 10 '12 at 12:50

4 Answers
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I've seen some course material from MIT, and it was shockingly bad. They had teaching materials which required VC5, bunches of implicit global variables, passing colours as "Blue" instead of 32bit ARGB, let alone 4x [0,1] floats, that sort of thing. I wouldn't trust a curriculum or code just because it comes from a big-name university.

My CS degree (from a university which is top 10 in the UK for CS) consisted of:

Robotics- covers stuff like computer vision and robot decision
making at a high level

As you'll notice, pretty much everything is "the basics" of something and almost nothing is covered to a useful depth.

The stuff that was actually worth doing, essential:

OOP- and then some more, and then some more

Functional programming- also some more. Try to pick a language like C++ or C# where you don't have to re-learn the syntax and tools, etc, to cover both styles.

The OS part- virtual memory is good to know about, as is kernel mode vs user mode. Skip segmentation and the IP stack.

Requirements analysis- Gotta be useful for any project

Algorithm analysis- knowing what algorithmic complexity is, how to reduce it, and what the complexity is of common operations is important.

Software project management models- many shops do Agile and many older ones still do Waterfall-style models.

International computing- Unicode is essential

The stuff that was worth doing, optionally:

Programming languages- Chomsky hierarchy, the tools of lexing and parsing. Skip the theory behind LL or LR parsers- an LR parser can accept virtually any realistic unambiguous CFG, and when it can't, your parser generator's documentation will tell you about it.

3D Graphics. I don't mean "Prove this is a rotation matrix formula" wastes of time, I mean actual "This is a vertex shader" stuff, or GPGPU. That's fun, interesting, and different.

Some of the AI stuff is fun- like potential fields and pathfinding.

Stuff that's essential but I didn't cover it anyway:

Concurrency- a must-know, at least the basics, for anyone in 2012.

The rest were a complete waste of time. Unfortunately, most of these nine points I either already knew, or picked up the useful parts elsewhere. If you read about things like the FizzBuzz problem it rapidly becomes apparent that you don't actually need to know all that much to be on top of the pack- which is fortunate, since my degree and many of the materials I've seen online for other degrees really do not teach much at all.

@ThorbjørnRavnAndersen: Theory is a tool to write code, nothing more. A theory is worth nothing if you can't use it to make better code.
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DeadMGJun 10 '12 at 12:46

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@Optimus: The vast majority of all theory cannot help you make better code.
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DeadMGJun 10 '12 at 12:53

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Theory is the foundation to know what code can be written, and what not.
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user1249Jun 10 '12 at 12:55

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There is some very good advice in this post, but you're too dogmatic about declaring some fields a waste of time. There is considerable variety in programming jobs these days, and what's a waste of time for one job may be essential for another job. Rather than simply dismissing something as a waste of time it would be helpful to describe the sorts of development you've been involved in.
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Charles E. GrantJun 10 '12 at 14:00

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I've done a lot of interviewing over the past few years, and it seems like the biggest gap these days in colleges is in teaching data structures and algorithms. The second biggest gap is in understanding how tools are implemented internally. In my opinion, classes in using a particular tool are a waste of time. There's not much point in knowing C++ syntax if you can't explain when to use a hash table and when to use a tree.
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Steven BurnapJun 10 '12 at 16:09

Open Course ware is just a list of courses that they have made available. If you want to know what a student would have taken, swing by MIT's(non OCW) website and look at the actual program. They have a list of what is required and what is considered a prereq for what.
Here is their page.

thanks, this will also be helpful, It is good to know what curriculum big univs are following
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OptimusJun 10 '12 at 16:51

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I'm doing EECS at Berkeley right now. If the MIT EECS program is structured anything like Berkeley's, then you won't get much guidance there: we have a short intro sequence and then it's literally do whatever you want in whatever order you want as long as you do a minimum number of advanced courses. I think it's awesome, but it probably won't help you figure out which courses to take: I had to make the same decisions myself. (I had help from my faculty advisor, but in a complete coincidence his advice was to take his graduate seminar :)).
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Tikhon JelvisJun 11 '12 at 5:43

@TikhonJelvis It is easier to make the choices of what you would like to learn and what you would not, once you have an idea of what the scope of the field is and what scope should at least be covered. I, being a Civil Engineering Grad, have little idea as to what goes on in Computer Science and Engg. Field
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OptimusJun 11 '12 at 16:30

Page 17 of the 2001 report has a handy chart which underlines all the "core" knowledge and still lists electives.

An undergraduate program wouldn't have time to cover even the courses considered core by these recommendations, so they will lump some of the categories together and let the students pick amongst them (eg, Operating Systems, Programming Languages, and Software Engineering get lumped into Software, and students pick a track).

You can find the required coursework on the CS department website for pretty much any school, and they should be some version of this.

good, a little out of date, but still a lot of subjects left to choice in a normal curriculum are considered core here, it is nice to have a wider choice of study available if you run out of the things you've got queued up +1.
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OptimusJun 11 '12 at 17:57

If I may, I'd like to suggest joining github.com as part of your learning process.

Then you can search around for code that has some real world application that you're interested in, clone it for yourself, work with it, code on it, and get to know it, and eventually start to submit patches back to the source project, and down the line be working on an open source project that you have a vested interest in.

And, of course, you'll get familiar with git, which is just all the better.